I have a big brew day coming up on the 16th and i am going to be doing 3 widely different styles; a Koelsch, a brown ale, and a stout. My hope is that by using a mixture of distilled water, local water, and some simple salts (Epsom, gypsum, CaCl) to come up with some halfway decent water profiles. I know I could build my own profile from scratch, but i am trying to keep it simply complex as possible

I have been trying to mess with water profiles using beer smith and brewater 3.0, but beer smith has no self calculation feature, and brewater won't work with our water profile. (Try it, enter my water profile, dilute it 100% with distilled, and it still will not self calculate the ion additions. Either that or I am stupid) Here is my idea so far:

Do these values look right/feasable? Is there a better and easier way to get the same results? I usually use 5.2 in my mash, but as a phosphate buffer, will it not precipitate out any Ca I put into my water? Thanks for the help.

I have been having this problem too. Noonan in New Lager Beers has this for London water:

CA 90
Mg 5
Na 15
SO4 40
Cl 20
HCO3 125

Designing Great Beers has this for London:

Ca 50
Mg 20
Na 100
SO4 80
Cl 60
HCO3 160

And BeerSmith has completely different numbers as well! This has been my experience with basically All water profiles. I wish I could help rather than confuse you more, but hopefully the experts can chime in and clear this up for us...

according to my source (CJHB Papazian pg. 263) your Dublin water profile is way off.

Right, I know it is not spot on, but it was as close as I could get given the dilution and salts I detailed above the profile. Given RO, my water profile, and some SIMPLE salt mesurements (I can only wiegh in gram increments right now) If any one wants to play around and get something closer, be my guest. Also let me know if my ballpark figgures are completely out of whack.

uhlee1, yeah, I noticed this as well. 10 different profiles from 10 different sources. Kinda like a poll on the best method of sparging My numbers above are pretty much ballpark of what I could hit with what I have. I was wondering if there are people out there (and I am sure there is) that play with water extensivly and know a better way to go at this, or can even narrow it down to 2 or 3 profiles that get most any beer that you would like to brew. Because to me, the Koln and London profile don't look that much different....